Narrow Results

Knowledge Management (KM) provides a systematic process to help in the creation, transfer and use of knowledge across the university, leading to increased productivity. While KM has been successfully used elsewhere, universities have been late in adopting it. Before a university can initiate KM, it needs to determine if it is ready for KM or not. Through a web-based survey sent to 1263 faculty members from 59 accredited Library and Information Science programs in universities across North America, this study investigated the effect of individual factors of trust, knowledge self-efficacy, collegiality, openness to change and reciprocity on individual readiness to participate in a KM initiative, and the degree to which this affects perceived organisational readiness to adopt KM. 157 valid responses were received. Using structural equation modeling, the study found that apart from trust, all other factors positively affected individual readiness, which was found to affect organisational readiness. Findings should help universities identify opportunities and barriers before they can adopt KM. It should be a useful contribution to the KM literature, especially in the university context.

Research in network science has shown that many naturally occurring and technologically constructed networks are scale free, that means a power law degree distribution emerges from a growth model in which each new node attaches to the existing network with a probability proportional to its number of links (= degree). Little is known about whether the same principles of local attachment and global properties apply to societies as well. Empirical evidence from six ethnographic case studies shows that complex social networks have significantly lower scaling exponents γ ~ 1 than have been assumed in the past. Apparently humans do not only look for the most prominent players to play with. Moreover cooperation in humans is characterized through reciprocity, the tendency to give to those from whom one has received in the past. Both variables — reciprocity and the scaling exponent — are negatively correlated (r = -0.767, sig = 0.075). If we include this effect in simulations of growing networks, degree distributions emerge that are much closer to those empirically observed. While the proportion of nodes with small degrees decreases drastically as we introduce reciprocity, the scaling exponent is more robust and changes only when a relatively large proportion of attachment decisions follow this rule. If social networks are less scale free than previously assumed this has far reaching implications for policy makers, public health programs and marketing alike.

In the last 30 years, several distinguished researchers have proposed and discussed different fuzzy versions of well-known Saaty's Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The paper recently published by K. Zhü in the European Journal of Operational Research heavily criticizes the fuzzy approaches to AHP, claiming the fallacy of all of them. Therefore, it seems to be necessary to clarify whether the criticisms are well-founded or not. The present paper aims to rebut Zhü's claims by showing that the evidences and the reasonings in his paper are very poor and far from proving the fallacy of fuzzy AHP.

For a finite set A of positive integers, we study the partition function p_A(n). This function enumerates the partitions of the positive integer n into parts in A. We give simple proofs of some known and unknown identities and congruences for p_A(n). For n in a special residue class, p_A(n) is a polynomial in n. We examine these polynomials for linear factors, and the results are applied to a restricted m-ary partition function. We extend the domain of p_A and prove a reciprocity formula with supplement. In closing we consider an asymptotic formula for p_A(n) and its refinement.

By identifying the efficiently radiating acoustic radiation modes of a fluid loaded vibrating structure, the storage requirements of the acoustic impedance matrix for calculation of the sound power using the boundary element method can be greatly reduced. In order to compute the acoustic radiation modes, the impedance matrix needs to be symmetric. However, when using the boundary element method, it is often found that the impedance matrix is not symmetric. This paper describes the origin of the asymmetry of the impedance matrix and presents a simple way to generate symmetry. The introduction of additional errors when symmetrizing the impedance matrix must be avoided. An example is used to demonstrate the behavior of the asymmetry and the effect of symmetrization of the impedance matrix on the sound power. The application of the technique presented in this work to compute the radiated sound power of a submerged marine vessel is discussed.

Inductive game theory has been developed to explore the origin of beliefs of a person from his accumulated experiences of a game situation. It has been restricted to a person's view of the structure not including another person's thoughts. In this paper, we explore the experiential origin of one's view of the other's beliefs about the game situation, especially about the other's payoffs. We restrict our exploration to a 2-role (strategic) game, which has been recurrently played by two people with occasional role-switching. Each person accumulates experiences of both roles, and these experiences become the source for his transpersonal view about the other. Reciprocity in the sense of role-switching is crucial for deriving his own and the other's beliefs. We also consider how a person can use these views for his behavior revision, and we define an equilibrium called an intrapersonal coordination equilibrium. Based on this, we show that cooperation will emerge as the degree of reciprocity increases.

Social relations between people seldom follow regular lattice structures. In the Barabási–Albert model nodes link to the existing network structure with a probability proportional to the number of nodes previously attached. Here, we present an anthropologically motivated interpolation between Erdös–Rényi and Barabási–Albert rules, where people also prefer to help those who helped them in the past and explore some of its properties. The second part of the paper tackles the question how opinions spread through social networks. We restrict our analysis to one end of the spectrum: scale-free networks. We show for two different models how fast and how sustainable single individuals can influence an appreciable fraction of the population through social contacts.